There are more suggestions hanging in the air waiting to be shot down.
Character replacement in c is very cheap.
So why not feed Diederik's filter with tab delimited data, and export space delimited data?
The filter first replaces all (non delimiting) spaces by underscores, then replaces all (delimiting) tabs by spaces.
Simple, and downwards compatible.
Erik
So far nobody has responded to my inquiry on whether they would be affected by this chance. So please let us know if you are consuming a server log and you are expecting spaces as delimiters. We want to make sure that we are aware of all the people that will be affected by this.